Presently there is a debate on Steemit about copyright, ownership, and usage of content not originally intended for the Steemit platform. This debate has given rise to a particular conundrum.
In the case of photography, there are many services which sell rights to photos (Shutterstock, Gettyimages, etc). There are also companies that scan the web for watermark-free images and sell them on eBay as posters, without the consent of the creator and, having a tenacious team of lawyers, are ready to claim it was their original work and counter sue (I will not list the names of these companies). This dynamic exists for all types of media in the modern world as long as one does not have to be geographically specific, and as we all know, the internet is not. Therefore, it would seem, that anyone who posts original content online, regardless of intention and without protecting it from being copied, is knowingly subjecting it to be copied, sold, or otherwise distributed without attribution or permission.
However, since the invention of Steemit—a cryptocurrency driven blogging platform which pays users to interact with it—this dynamic has changed. 99.9999% of people who post content online, do not know that they could post it on Steemit and get paid, and would probably be upset if they found out someone else made money off of their content by re-posting to Steemit, even if their intention for the original content was to give it away to be copied.
And, as Shakespeare says, there’s the rub.
Should users be frowned on for posting non-original content? Does curation constitute creation? Should credit be given? If so, how extensively? Should a fund be created that claims can be drawn from? And on and on. One could even argue that the entire fate of Steemit is wrapped up in this debate.
For instance, without respecting copyright, Steemit might not scale. If someone posted all the Kayne West music videos and made millions from them and the RIAA came down hard, that might create the competitive edge needed for another blockchain-based social media platform to take it’s place—one that does a better job of respecting copyright.
But if rights can be respected and Steemit scales from 100k users to 1M, 10M, or 100M the campaign for protecting content rights will be drowned out by the masses who are not privy to this conversation. At some point, enforcing copyright on a blockchain of scale would break the will of anyone who tries. In effect, creating a system full of copyright infringement. And in so campaigning for rights they will create the very system they are trying to put an end to.
But there are two sides to this debate.
Because Steemit distributes its own ownership, it has the ability to rock the business models of every creative endeavor to it’s core. It eliminates the need of artists to seek protection from a third party. Be it publishing (why do I need a publisher?) or music (why do I need a label?) or film (why do I need a distributor?).
"Stop! This is the Empire of the Dead"
As for modern music, originally, there was the centralized record label. The artist needed the label for branding, marketing, funding, accounting, and a variety of other resources, for which they sacrificed ownership of content. In the wake of the mp3 revolution, there was crowd funding or YouTube Partnerships. If the artist could prove themselves by taking control of their brand, distribution, and marketing sufficiently, garnering enough views, eventually they would become Partners, and YouTube would fund them according to viewership so they could continue the project. They maintained ownership but it was a mutually beneficial relationship where the artist was beholden to YouTube.
Steemit is a platform which has figured out how to completely decentralize crowdsourcing—replacing YouTube like YouTube replaced a traditional record label. On Steemit, an artist can keep ownership, branding, funding, and accounting indefinitely. And, according to how much the community appreciates it, can get paid from the very first day as well. Why would they ever rely on a trusted third party again?
This tangent is important to take note of for the current debate on usage, not for the user who wants to share other peoples content, but for the people who created content outside of Steemit, and might not see their rightful share of revenue. If present adoption trends continue at Steemit, and Steemit becomes an internationally famous online brand like Facebook or Reddit, any company or individual who sues Steemit, or a user of Steemit, for copyright infringement while knowing that they could have posted on Steemit themselves and made the money outright, will in effect be attempting to shut down the very thing they are claiming to protect—the rights of the Artist to his or her own work.
